Join us every Sunday during January for a weekly salute to free speech, big ideas, rants, raves and good old fashioned ratbaggery.

For well over a hundred years Speaker’s Corner (located at the Domain) has witnessed a parade of colourful characters having their say about anything and everything from feminism to religion, politics to sexual revolution.

Sydney Festival salutes the original Speaker’s Corner with a curated line-up featuring some of Sydney’s best spruikers taking to our three Soapbox stages (running simultaneously) to stimulate, contemplate and possibly irritate and placate. Provocative entertainment ahead!

Sunday 9 January (host Simon Marnie)

Ratbags & rabble-rousers: The curious history of the Sydney Domain and Speaker’s Corner with Warren Fahey (Cultural Historian, author and performer).

Taking a sledgehammer to myths, misconceptions and stereotypes facing First Australians with Nathan Moran (CEO, Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council).

Jay Katz & Miss Death on Rules for living. Jamie & Aspasia Leonarder, inner-city legends, tackle the big issues of life as we know it (or think we know it).

Sunday 16 January (host James Valentine)

Two Dames You Wouldn’t Want to Meet in a Kings Cross Back Alley: Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh – the Razor Gangs with Larry Writer (Noted journalist and author of ‘Underbelly Razor’)

'Cut Me a Line… of Poetry': Rants, raves and songs with Benito Di Fonzo (Poet, playwright, singer-songwriter and journalist)

Talking off the Top of Our Heads: Two Sides of the Sydney Speaker’s Corner Story with Stephen Maxwell & Vladimir (Two of Sydney’s free-wheeling street orators)

Sunday 23 January (host Warren Fahey)

Unscrambling the Queer Alphabet with Nell Schofield & Joyce Manage. (Nell Schofield is an activist, presenter and documentary maker. 'Joyce Mang'e is the alter ego of Shane Pascoe and she’s quite a dame!)

"You sexist pigs had better start shaking, today's pigs are tomorrow’s bacon." Calling out Australia’s biggest misogynists with Stephanie Broadbridge & Jess Fuchs. Two of Australia’s cleverest young female comedians tackle the problem of misogyny and other feminist issues.

Boomers stuffed our world with Bec Charlwood & Aleks Milinkovic (direct from Magic Mic Comedy).

Sunday 30 January (host Warren Fahey) 

Skepticism pseudoscience and the paranormal, freedom of speech and the anti-vax, conspiracies, and citizen science movements” - Tim Mendham (Executive Officer, Australian Skeptics inc. Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the largest and oldest English-language skeptical group in the world.)

Tivoli daze: Bring back Vaudeville & Razzamatazz with Mic Conway and Robbie Long (VLF: Vaudeville Liberation Front).

Lockdowns, washdowns and The Rats Must Die: scary parallels between the 1900 Sydney epidemic and COVID with Michael Adams (writer & presenter Forgotten Australia podcasts).